It's not dungeons and dragons, but I was playing Exalted the other day, and one of our team, (the HUGE Polar Bear Aspect Lunar) makes a valiant attack at a giant stone snake in a small circular stone room.

He pumps as much Essence (the Exalted equivalent of Mana) into his attack, ends up hitting the snake with 23 damage dice. He rolls damage, laughing maniacally, and gets only a single success. One 7+ (out of 10) out of 23 dice.

He was destroyed.. He was screaming, crying, throwing a fit. It was sort of funny, but the GM did a wonderfully awesome thing, and it will probably go down in history as my favorite GM move ever. Rather then just saying "lol, you hit the snake for 1 bashing", he described the attack like this

"Otaar raises his mighty Grand Gormaul over his head and laughs triumphantly. Bringing the massive hammer to bear horizontally, he swings, and completely misses the giant snake. Crestfallen, he follows his mighty blow through regardless, and strikes a nearby wall. The hammerhead smashes through the wall with the thunderous noise of a thousand thunderbolts, and creates a huge hole in the solid stone wall. Bits of debris, large and small cascade into the room. One particularly large piece of stone smashes into the snake, dealing it a single bashing damage."

I was gobsmacked.

It was absolutely the best GM move I had ever seen. Taking what was a hard earned but mindblowingly awful defeat, turning it into something both wonderful, and effective, as the hole gave us an opportunity to escape form the room.

So what I learned from that moment is, as a GM, it's possible to turn botches into good results without fudging the rolls.

I might consider getting into tabletop gaming, but nobody I know is into it (as far as I know). My family is out of the picture, any form of gaming more mentally trying than Cribbage leaves me looking like the douche because I actually have the patience to play a long running game. Monopoly is dusting in the basement, and I can't even think of buying Risk.

What was I talking about? Tabletop gaming would be nice, but I already spend plenty of time in the RP section here, so even though I don't know what I'm missing, I don't miss it.

Hah that was great, and that is what makes Exalted AWESOME. I can't wait to start playing it again this summer after we are done our Alternity campaign. I got so many awesome memories of Exalted with my douchebag fire aspected Dragonblooded :P

I have to disagree on the point that it's okay to make mistakes. My group once encountered a Deck of Many Things. Most people drew at least one negative effect, such as losing all their stuff, or losing experience. I drew only good things, rocketing up to level 12, and a magical item of my choosing. Another guy got two penalty-free wishes, one of which was used to free a guy who had been trapped in a different dimension. The other was intended to get all negative effects of the deck removed, and a wish blade with three gems(giving us three more wishes). So, we get sent back in time 3 hours, before we had drawn from the deck. I lost my levels and magic item, everyone else lost their cool stuff, and the DM wouldn't allow us to draw again. Then, a new guy joined, drew from the Deck(we still had it, we just weren't allowed to draw from it) and summoned a dreadwraith. I died, and ended up owing the group 10000 gold for a resurrection.

TL/DR: A stupid guy cost me something awesome with a mistake, made in sheer greed. Of course, our DM is also evil incarnate, so I may have something of a unique story here.

Altorin:It's not dungeons and dragons, but I was playing Exalted the other day, and one of our team, (the HUGE Polar Bear Aspect Lunar) makes a valiant attack at a giant stone snake in a small circular stone room.

He pumps as much Essence (the Exalted equivalent of Mana) into his attack, ends up hitting the snake with 23 damage dice. He rolls damage, laughing maniacally, and gets only a single success. One 7+ (out of 10) out of 23 dice.

He was destroyed.. He was screaming, crying, throwing a fit. It was sort of funny, but the GM did a wonderfully awesome thing, and it will probably go down in history as my favorite GM move ever. Rather then just saying "lol, you hit the snake for 1 bashing", he described the attack like this

"Otaar raises his mighty Grand Gormaul over his head and laughs triumphantly. Bringing the massive hammer to bear horizontally, he swings, and completely misses the giant snake. Crestfallen, he follows his mighty blow through regardless, and strikes a nearby wall. The hammerhead smashes through the wall with the thunderous noise of a thousand thunderbolts, and creates a huge hole in the solid stone wall. Bits of debris, large and small cascade into the room. One particularly large piece of stone smashes into the snake, dealing it a single bashing damage."

I was gobsmacked.

It was absolutely the best GM move I had ever seen. Taking what was a hard earned but mindblowingly awful defeat, turning it into something both wonderful, and effective, as the hole gave us an opportunity to escape form the room.

So what I learned from that moment is, as a GM, it's possible to turn botches into good results without fudging the rolls.

First time playing exalted, the Abyssal in the party steals one of the peaches of immortality from a passing waiter as we were visiting the heavens to talk to some god to help and rewrite a city's fate (they were backlogged and hadn't gotten too it yet). Beat the god that was guiding us by one success, even after taking away 4 of his rolls with a charm (night cast, could suppress his anima banner) Granted the big boss god noticed it, but let her keep it. She gave half to me since I was the only "mortal" she could stand and thus didn't want to spend her immortality alone. Yay for one shot campaign awesomness.

Hah that was great, and that is what makes Exalted AWESOME. I can't wait to start playing it again this summer after we are done our Alternity campaign. I got so many awesome memories of Exalted with my douchebag fire aspected Dragonblooded :P

my character has an abject hatred of Dragonbloods..

My favorite thing about my character is actually that my GM actually lets me be stealthy without punishing me. A couple of earlier GMs didn't understand how to deal with a character that was basically invisible 80% of the time.

I also like my character concept, which has devolved into the following: Ninja/Moses/Mega Man/Jax.

When I started out, I was a slave liberator who had a Bracer that fired darts (using my thrown excellencies).. Attaching different hearthstones to the bracer allowed me to fire different things out of it. A few weeks ago, I aquired an armored arm, which basically gave one of my arms 5 strength and I've been using that "robo-arm" a lot.

Hah that was great, and that is what makes Exalted AWESOME. I can't wait to start playing it again this summer after we are done our Alternity campaign. I got so many awesome memories of Exalted with my douchebag fire aspected Dragonblooded :P

my character has an abject hatred of Dragonbloods..

My favorite thing about my character is actually that my GM actually lets me be stealthy without punishing me. A couple of earlier GMs didn't understand how to deal with a character that was basically invisible 80% of the time.

I also like my character concept, which has devolved into the following: Ninja/Moses/Mega Man/Jax.

When I started out, I was a slave liberator who had a Bracer that fired darts (using my thrown excellencies).. Attaching different hearthstones to the bracer allowed me to fire different things out of it. A few weeks ago, I aquired an armored arm, which basically gave one of my arms 5 strength and I've been using that "robo-arm" a lot.

I was a fire aspected Drgonblooded who was a complete douchebag since I had 1 compassion and 4 conviction. So I pretty much burned kittens for fun "DIE FLAMMABLE KITTENS!!" Our very firs campaign we ever had we pretty much failed it since we killed everything in sight. We didn't know talking didn't take an action so the second we got attacked it was "DIE DIE DIE *ghost fire blade* *death of obsidian butterflies*".

So we ended up killing our cousin who were supposed to take back, slaughtered a bunch of Lunars, had an awesome helms deep type battle (and won, I burned A LOT of people), my friend killed anyone who wore a phez (it's complicated), and well you get the idea...a lot of killing. Hell I got so good at killing shit I managed to destroy a few war striders along the way.

I had a hand of the mountain as a pet (who I called Krunk) and he boosted my attack to obcene levels. I would have him throw me at times like a missile right at the enemy. We did a lot of funky shit, but that's what great about the game, combat is limited to your imagination and how cool you can make it look.

Our first adventure was just full of crazy shit and fail, but so unbelievably FUN. My crowning moment though is still the time we raided an old temple to find out it was the lair to a dragonking and pissed it off so we GTFO. We had a drgonking with up too and he had no idea wtf was going on so when we escaped we was just picked up by my friends greater sun hawk and flown away while I lassoed his leg and pretty much Ariel wake boarded with my Diakaive. I had my fire anima up as well and has my magical spear out shooting fucking lasers at this pterodactyl dragonking chasing us (who was shooting back with HIS lasers) while the forest below me caught fire due to my low altitude and my fire anima. I burned a few villages by accident (still enjoyed it) and was shooting fucking lasers everywhere. We finally ouran it but that was the BEST SCENE EVER.

*catches breath* ok ending rambling now, but you get my point, Exalted is AWESOME. As my GM friend says "It's like the JRPG of PnP RPG's" and i couldn't agree more.

Sporky111:I might consider getting into tabletop gaming, but nobody I know is into it (as far as I know). My family is out of the picture, any form of gaming more mentally trying than Cribbage leaves me looking like the douche because I actually have the patience to play a long running game. Monopoly is dusting in the basement, and I can't even think of buying Risk.

What was I talking about? Tabletop gaming would be nice, but I already spend plenty of time in the RP section here, so even though I don't know what I'm missing, I don't miss it.

DividedUnity:I would try D&D out of curiousity maybe once. Either way it doesnt matter no one plays it round here

you'll be surprised how many people play if you want to start finding a group goto a hobbie store or somwere that sell's d&d or warhammer or somthing like that and just ask around you could also check online for some groups, i found one that im gonna start going to on thursday VIA http://www.meetup.com/

I will never forget my dual spiked-shields wielding warrior. Lots of good memories smashing pretty much everything in sight to a bloody pulp, or grappling them up against my spiked shock enchanted armor. Of course my DM got annoyed with my insane amounts of damaged and dropped me in a deep lake, swim checks are hard in the amount of armor I had.

Soooo, it's it's a truth universally acknowledged that it's relatively easy to turn a willing video-game player into a P&P player (and I should know, that's how I started), but here's a poser for you:

I have a work colleague who's expressed an interest in roleplaying, but she's not a video-gamer by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I don't think she even has a home PC, let alone any consoles; she does have a large number of board games though. However, if someone wants to roleplay I say let them! But I'm a bit stuck as to how to introduce her to roleplaying. I'm not too worried about her grasping the concepts of fantasy worlds because she's probably read enough fantasy (and seen enough films) to be fine with all that. As for systems, it's kind of a toss-up between pulpy Savage Worlds (which is indeed fun, fast and furious with doddle-tastic char-gen, but I don't own the core book and I've only played it once) and D&D 3.5, which I have at least played lots of and GM'ed a few times. Plus I have all the books for that. I can rope in a couple of other people who've got more ttRPG experience to help out with the rules side of things (I hope!) and flesh out the party a bit. If anyone's got any good suggestions as to things I should consider and be aware of when introducing someone so new to RPGs, I would be very interested to hear them! :)

Great article for those who are starting to or thinking of getting into tabletop gaming.Is it sad that I immediately looked at that picture of dice and thought, "Why is there no d8 and why are there two percentile die?"

Taco of flames:I have to disagree on the point that it's okay to make mistakes. My group once encountered a Deck of Many Things. Most people drew at least one negative effect, such as losing all their stuff, or losing experience. I drew only good things, rocketing up to level 12, and a magical item of my choosing. Another guy got two penalty-free wishes, one of which was used to free a guy who had been trapped in a different dimension. The other was intended to get all negative effects of the deck removed, and a wish blade with three gems(giving us three more wishes). So, we get sent back in time 3 hours, before we had drawn from the deck. I lost my levels and magic item, everyone else lost their cool stuff, and the DM wouldn't allow us to draw again. Then, a new guy joined, drew from the Deck(we still had it, we just weren't allowed to draw from it) and summoned a dreadwraith. I died, and ended up owing the group 10000 gold for a resurrection.

TL/DR: A stupid guy cost me something awesome with a mistake, made in sheer greed. Of course, our DM is also evil incarnate, so I may have something of a unique story here.

Dude. Exactly the same thing happened to us. Those decks are a pain in the neck.

Mistakes are always the highlights of P&P games though, we have a graveyard folder with dozens of absurd old character sheets in it. One is scrawled with "Died as unwilling human shield for greedy dwarven prick" another with "Executed waiting for rescue from greedy dwarven prick" and finally my own contribution "GREEDY DWARVEN PRICK ACCIDENTALLY DROWNED IN MY PIT TRAP FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU"

I now feel much better prepared to start a tabletop game. It actually sounds like something me and my friends would really like, we've been doing a weekly Borderlands night - maybe at some point we'll ask our friend to DM for us and initiate us into the world of D&D.

In my experience, having a the right system is an important part of teaching rpgs to a newbie. A non-competative fun game without too much in the way of messy rules works much better in my experience than something number-crunchy. Demon Hunter is the best I've encountered so far for that (and also the only game where you can start off with a kitten that's aware he'she's an rpg character as a familiar).

Hah that was great, and that is what makes Exalted AWESOME. I can't wait to start playing it again this summer after we are done our Alternity campaign. I got so many awesome memories of Exalted with my douchebag fire aspected Dragonblooded :P

my character has an abject hatred of Dragonbloods..

My favorite thing about my character is actually that my GM actually lets me be stealthy without punishing me. A couple of earlier GMs didn't understand how to deal with a character that was basically invisible 80% of the time.

I also like my character concept, which has devolved into the following: Ninja/Moses/Mega Man/Jax.

When I started out, I was a slave liberator who had a Bracer that fired darts (using my thrown excellencies).. Attaching different hearthstones to the bracer allowed me to fire different things out of it. A few weeks ago, I aquired an armored arm, which basically gave one of my arms 5 strength and I've been using that "robo-arm" a lot.

What is this game, and where can I find it? It sounds awesome.

I was a fire aspected Drgonblooded who was a complete douchebag since I had 1 compassion and 4 conviction. So I pretty much burned kittens for fun "DIE FLAMMABLE KITTENS!!" Our very firs campaign we ever had we pretty much failed it since we killed everything in sight. We didn't know talking didn't take an action so the second we got attacked it was "DIE DIE DIE *ghost fire blade* *death of obsidian butterflies*".

So we ended up killing our cousin who were supposed to take back, slaughtered a bunch of Lunars, had an awesome helms deep type battle (and won, I burned A LOT of people), my friend killed anyone who wore a phez (it's complicated), and well you get the idea...a lot of killing. Hell I got so good at killing shit I managed to destroy a few war striders along the way.

I had a hand of the mountain as a pet (who I called Krunk) and he boosted my attack to obcene levels. I would have him throw me at times like a missile right at the enemy. We did a lot of funky shit, but that's what great about the game, combat is limited to your imagination and how cool you can make it look.

Our first adventure was just full of crazy shit and fail, but so unbelievably FUN. My crowning moment though is still the time we raided an old temple to find out it was the lair to a dragonking and pissed it off so we GTFO. We had a drgonking with up too and he had no idea wtf was going on so when we escaped we was just picked up by my friends greater sun hawk and flown away while I lassoed his leg and pretty much Ariel wake boarded with my Diakaive. I had my fire anima up as well and has my magical spear out shooting fucking lasers at this pterodactyl dragonking chasing us (who was shooting back with HIS lasers) while the forest below me caught fire due to my low altitude and my fire anima. I burned a few villages by accident (still enjoyed it) and was shooting fucking lasers everywhere. We finally ouran it but that was the BEST SCENE EVER.

*catches breath* ok ending rambling now, but you get my point, Exalted is AWESOME. As my GM friend says "It's like the JRPG of PnP RPG's" and i couldn't agree more.

Just search online for Exalted or search your local hobby shop. It really is a fun game but if you really know how to play you need a shit load of D10's. It's got a really really good mythos and the races have some interesting depth to them. Each race pretty much has like 6 jobs they can take (each race has it's own set of "jobs"). The books are kind of expensive from what I saw if you got to a shop, like 40 bucks a book.

One of my biggest tips to anyone playing an rpg with a character they like is have an escape plan for when everything hits the fan. I as playing a game of dnd last week were this let me survive a hopeless situation. We had worked our way into an enemy's fortress that was surrounded by a sea of zombies and only had one entrance. We had actually bluffed our way in pretending to be allies, when one of our team members betrayed us. At this point about 4 people left our game for a few weeks. The remaining 3 party members including myself decided to go on with the campaign. This led to last week where the three of us were sneaking past an enemy patrol. I had decided to stay as far back as possible and told our dm that I would run at the first sign of trouble. I should also point out that my character has a hat of disguise and was using it to disguise himself as a zombie at the time. As we were sneaking out of nowhere the other two party members get attacked by enemies who had sneaked up on us. They were then hit by a second set of attacks which instantly knocked them down to dieing. At this point I started running from the impossible battle. What would normally happen in such circumstances, I would have to keep running until I either found a good enough hiding place or got killed. But because I was disguised as a zombie the dm offered me the chance to try escaping through the sea of zombies. I made it to the otherside only taking 20 damage, when one of my teammates was killed and the other was crucified.

Love, the Guide really stellar.. Tomorrow I'm going to show it to some of my less Savvy Table Mates. I have a fail story that's really Delicious.. From a table top game me and my friends all made one boring Saturday and Sunday.

So it starts out any normal campaign, the Mutant Flies are infesting a tavern and we're hired to destroy them. So one of our players enters a battle with Three of the said flies, and our GM being the crazily awesome kid he is randomly yelled..

A submarine Approaches! We looked at him bewildered, and he simply told us "I don't know how it drove on land it just did, so get to fighting" So the battle person decided to roll to take out the Sub first, rolls a 20 then a 15 and takes it down.. when our GM decides "It was a soviet nuclear Sub, which explodes causing 4000 damage! Crits to all party" So we all died, but no one was pissed at the new guy because it was just too damn funny how our GM made a victory into a failure (which in my eyes was more fun then you gain 600 EXP)

Mr.PlanetEater:Love, the Guide really stellar.. Tomorrow I'm going to show it to some of my less Savvy Table Mates. I have a fail story that's really Delicious.. From a table top game me and my friends all made one boring Saturday and Sunday.

So it starts out any normal campaign, the Mutant Flies are infesting a tavern and we're hired to destroy them. So one of our players enters a battle with Three of the said flies, and our GM being the crazily awesome kid he is randomly yelled..

A submarine Approaches! We looked at him bewildered, and he simply told us "I don't know how it drove on land it just did, so get to fighting" So the battle person decided to roll to take out the Sub first, rolls a 20 then a 15 and takes it down.. when our GM decides "It was a soviet nuclear Sub, which explodes causing 4000 damage! Crits to all party" So we all died, but no one was pissed at the new guy because it was just too damn funny how our GM made a victory into a failure (which in my eyes was more fun then you gain 600 EXP)

You must've been bored. That or I'm just jaded with regard to LOLRANDUMB roleplaying. Too much World of Darkness for me.

I have a work colleague who's expressed an interest in roleplaying, but she's not a video-gamer by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I don't think she even has a home PC, let alone any consoles; she does have a large number of board games though. However, if someone wants to roleplay I say let them! But I'm a bit stuck as to how to introduce her to roleplaying. I'm not too worried about her grasping the concepts of fantasy worlds because she's probably read enough fantasy (and seen enough films) to be fine with all that. As for systems, it's kind of a toss-up between pulpy Savage Worlds (which is indeed fun, fast and furious with doddle-tastic char-gen, but I don't own the core book and I've only played it once) and D&D 3.5, which I have at least played lots of and GM'ed a few times. Plus I have all the books for that. I can rope in a couple of other people who've got more ttRPG experience to help out with the rules side of things (I hope!) and flesh out the party a bit. If anyone's got any good suggestions as to things I should consider and be aware of when introducing someone so new to RPGs, I would be very interested to hear them! :)

Thanks in advance!

I'd say start her on Savage, it's a friendlier system for Newbies and it's still a fun system for experienced players.

I only take issue with that you passively implied the party would have to entertain themselves while playing as though playing in itself wasn't an entertaining and rewarding enough experience. I know you meant in supplement to the fun you reap from dungeon crawling, but that just bugged me.

I've found if you're playing with first timers who are unable to take the game seriously (pay attention) you end up getting nowhere, often because they're too uncomfortable to roleplay and don't fall into their characters, so they distract themselves. They should probably read this.

You should write something for first time Game Masters too (because if I haven't said already, this was really awesome). It can be pretty tough if you have a lack of old neckbeards at hand all the time, and need to learn some guidelines for good "Dungeonmastering". Just sayin'

>.< I IMPLORE PEOPLE TO PURSUE THEIR INTEREST IN PEN AND PAPER RPG! >.<

My friend and I are trying somewhat to get involved in Warhammer 40k.I suspect if we asked around at our local hobby shop where we acquire all our miniatures we would be able to get into tabletop RPGs.

Fun story from D&D a few weeks back. Our party is in a troll warren when we come across a blacksmithing room. Big troll boss with some minions, no problem. So I do my usual thing and do a flying kick across the room (love 4.0 monks) and do a bit of damage. Now it's the trolls turn. It throws me into a goddamn forge. Now, the sorcere is near by and grants me fire resistance of enough that natural fire doesn't do shit to me. So I am now on fire, with a troll who is next to a vat of pitch (it's what the forges are, this one is just not lie). So I run across the battlefield and kick and punch, shifting it and myself into the pitch. Now, the pitch EXPLODES, and I end up taking no damage due to fire resist and my absurdly high reflex save, and the troll get's roasted then smashed against the ceiling. Also lost a crowbar in our last campaign trying to pry open an extrademinsional gate (combined roll was somewhere around 70). It fucking sprouted tentacles and became a Cthulhu crowbar, which promptly got squished. God I love my group.

I've always wanted to get into tabletop games (specifically, D&D). But here's the thing: back in high school, it was a "guys only" club, and now that I've shipped out for college & grad school, no one in my neighborhood plays (well, maybe some do, but there's no way I'm playing D&D in any other language than English). So thank you Mr. Tito, for making me yearn even more for something I can't have! (Kidding! I'm actually quite glad that you're saying something I've believed for years: it can't be *that* hard. Can it?)

Lunar Shadow:Fun story from D&D a few weeks back. Our party is in a troll warren when we come across a blacksmithing room. Big troll boss with some minions, no problem. So I do my usual thing and do a flying kick across the room (love 4.0 monks) and do a bit of damage. Now it's the trolls turn. It throws me into a goddamn forge. Now, the sorcere is near by and grants me fire resistance of enough that natural fire doesn't do shit to me. So I am now on fire, with a troll who is next to a vat of pitch (it's what the forges are, this one is just not lie). So I run across the battlefield and kick and punch, shifting it and myself into the pitch. Now, the pitch EXPLODES, and I end up taking no damage due to fire resist and my absurdly high reflex save, and the troll get's roasted then smashed against the ceiling. Also lost a crowbar in our last campaign trying to pry open an extrademinsional gate (combined roll was somewhere around 70). It fucking sprouted tentacles and became a Cthulhu crowbar, which promptly got squished. God I love my group.

Oh. My. God. That sounds so frakin' awesome. I've always believed that monks rule,a nd now I've got proof (with a little help from sorcerers, which are a close second in my book).

Eleima:So thank you Mr. Tito, for making me yearn even more for something I can't have! (Kidding! I'm actually quite glad that you're saying something I've believed for years: it can't be *that* hard. Can it?)

I'm sure you could get into it if you want. There are probably hundreds of people in your area that think just like you do "Noone plays, so I can't play"

All you have to do is try, and you'll find that people are quite open to trying it themselves.

Hopefully Tito will write that column he hinted at about actually finding a group if you're in your situation where noone you currently know openly plays.

Eleima:So thank you Mr. Tito, for making me yearn even more for something I can't have! (Kidding! I'm actually quite glad that you're saying something I've believed for years: it can't be *that* hard. Can it?)

I'm sure you could get into it if you want. There are probably hundreds of people in your area that think just like you do "Noone plays, so I can't play"All you have to do is try, and you'll find that people are quite open to trying it themselves.Hopefully Tito will write that column he hinted at about actually finding a group if you're in your situation where noone you currently know openly plays.

Like I said, there's no way on Earth I'm playing in any other language than English, so unless I'm willing to swim across the English Channel every other weekend, that's a no go. ;)But yeah, I'm hoping he'll write that column about starting a group in which everyone's a total "noob". I'm sure I'd fit right in! =D

Eleima:So thank you Mr. Tito, for making me yearn even more for something I can't have! (Kidding! I'm actually quite glad that you're saying something I've believed for years: it can't be *that* hard. Can it?)

I'm sure you could get into it if you want. There are probably hundreds of people in your area that think just like you do "Noone plays, so I can't play"All you have to do is try, and you'll find that people are quite open to trying it themselves.Hopefully Tito will write that column he hinted at about actually finding a group if you're in your situation where noone you currently know openly plays.

Like I said, there's no way on Earth I'm playing in any other language than English, so unless I'm willing to swim across the English Channel every other weekend, that's a no go. ;)But yeah, I'm hoping he'll write that column about starting a group in which everyone's a total "noob". I'm sure I'd fit right in! =D

Well, I managed to find English-speaking gaming groups in Japan and Germany, so it's just a question of looking in the right places. Try out Meetup.com - I've had some success with that in both Germany and Australia, or maybe stick a note up in a local games shop asking for English players. Chances are you're not alone and somebody else who's desperate to meet English-speaking players will respond. If there's an ex-pats network for France (like Toytown in Germany), hop on and make enquiries - you might shake someone out like that.

ETA: Don't disregard the workplace as a place to find players either, although that requires actually coming out of the gaming closet. Scary!

Eleima:I've always wanted to get into tabletop games (specifically, D&D). But here's the thing: back in high school, it was a "guys only" club, and now that I've shipped out for college & grad school, no one in my neighborhood plays (well, maybe some do, but there's no way I'm playing D&D in any other language than English). So thank you Mr. Tito, for making me yearn even more for something I can't have! (Kidding! I'm actually quite glad that you're saying something I've believed for years: it can't be *that* hard. Can it?)

Lunar Shadow:Fun story from D&D a few weeks back. Our party is in a troll warren when we come across a blacksmithing room. Big troll boss with some minions, no problem. So I do my usual thing and do a flying kick across the room (love 4.0 monks) and do a bit of damage. Now it's the trolls turn. It throws me into a goddamn forge. Now, the sorcere is near by and grants me fire resistance of enough that natural fire doesn't do shit to me. So I am now on fire, with a troll who is next to a vat of pitch (it's what the forges are, this one is just not lie). So I run across the battlefield and kick and punch, shifting it and myself into the pitch. Now, the pitch EXPLODES, and I end up taking no damage due to fire resist and my absurdly high reflex save, and the troll get's roasted then smashed against the ceiling. Also lost a crowbar in our last campaign trying to pry open an extrademinsional gate (combined roll was somewhere around 70). It fucking sprouted tentacles and became a Cthulhu crowbar, which promptly got squished. God I love my group.

Oh. My. God. That sounds so frakin' awesome. I've always believed that monks rule,a nd now I've got proof (with a little help from sorcerers, which are a close second in my book).

If you play a monk in 3.5 / 4.0 correct, then yes you can be overpowerd and rule. In 4.0 thought I prefer the Invoker or bard more cause those classes can make it really hard for a Gm and can turn the battle from complete disaster to more fun ^^. For example the Bard gets a skills where he can roll 3d20 these d20 can be used for other rolls, for your self, other players and ofcourse for the GM ^^ so if you roll 6,5,18 you can give 18 to other player's or if you hate your ally's to the GM."So roll your attack!" GMroll 7"7 ah thats to low" GM"well here have a 18" Bard"....." GMHit 18